Sketchnotes

I have been experimenting with Sketchnotes for a while. I just stumbled across @rohdesign and his work. I tried my hand at it and I was hooked. After struggling for a few days I got the hang of it. I then tried doing a Sketchnote live during a talk I gave and to illustrate most of my recent articles. I now tell the publisher, print the article and get a Sketchnote for free to go with it. People Matters magazine was not quite pleased with the deal! <see this>

If you want to build your listening skills then there can be no better way to learn it than to try taking visual notes of an event. You have to listen to the speaker with rapt attention or else you won’t be able to listen and sketch quickly.You have to use your ear, your eyes, and draw while keeping up with the speaker. No speaker would complain about a distracted audience if everyone took notes instead of fidgeting with their phones during the talk.

I use a pencil or a black gel pen (I admit I have a problem. I can never have enough black gel pens) and a note book to sketch the key ideas and build connections. I add the colors and banners when the speaker handles a question from the audience. The purists will frown upon anyone who uses a pencil and eraser to do draft Sketchnotes but then I found it useful to do pencil sketches before I inked them up. I have become more adventurous since!

That book demystifies the whole technique. It is all about looking for ideas and depicting the key ideas visually.

Sketchnotes is about ideas and not drawing ability. It is about thinking visually and drawing something that is good enough to convey the idea. It is visual shorthand at its best.

Visualizing the idea etches it in a relatively uncluttered part of the brain. That makes recall easy. It helps you to simplify and clarify ideas just the way doing a process flow chart does. But more than anything, this forces you to listen to the speaker with rapt attention. I create a sketchnote of books or articles that I read.

Some tips to get started:

The tools: A blank note book, a pencil, easer and black gel pen is all what you need.

Build a visual library: Practice drawing quick sketches of common business terms like team, meeting, goal, achieve etc. The visual symbol and not the artistic skill is what matters.

Start with recorded talks: Listen to the TED talk by Sunni Brown on doodling and create a Sketchnote of the talk. I started with sketching recorded talks and now venture to sketch live during talks. I need to be gutsy enough to try doodling to capture meeting notes.

Practice and share: Try to recall the key ideas of your last meeting and create one. You can do a sketchnote when you travel.

Share your work on social media and get feedback. On Pinterest.com you can create a board called Sketchnotes and post photos of your sketchnotes.

Comments

Howdy Anita!That’s a thing I’d love to learn more in depthand it makes a great sense for me who one of the side-projects is to write stand-up skechtes Thanks for the heads up I’ll check all links and literature, Enjoy Texas!

Wonderful article Matt. It’s just prtcciae folks, you will start off slowly. I have about ten sketchbooks full of sketchnotes, I look back on the early ones now and cringe. But I know that in the future I will look back on the ones I have recently done and cringe at them as well. It’s about relative scale, if you prtcciae you will get better and over time develop your own style.As Matt suggests go prtcciae copying and drawing standard objects, increasing your standard library, prtcciae these all the time till they become second nature to draw. Also prtcciae printing neatly at speed. Knowing what to draw and what not too is sometimes a guessing game. Don’t worry about making mistakes, after all the sketchnote is for you not other people. Worst is when a speaker is allowed to go over time or under time or your are given the wrong finish time. That does stuff up the sketchnote. Mind you can always backfill if the talk runs short. Want a real challenge sketchnote the evening news.

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[…] Vora] I discovered the technique of visual note taking through a blog post on the same topic by Abhijit Bhaduri. I have been blogging about leadership, learning and quality since last 10 years and I found a […]

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About Abhijit

Abhijit Bhaduri works as the Chief Learning Officer for the Wipro group. He lives in Bangalore, India. Prior to this he led HR teams at Microsoft, PepsiCo, Colgate and Tata Steel and worked in India, SE Asia and US.

He is on the Advisory Board of the prestigious program for Chief Learning Officers that is run by the Univ of Pennsylvania.